With my traditional manga mindset came a lot more visual humor and, to a point, slapstick. In a lot of ways, the mood and pacing of these pages feels more like a Ghibli movie to me than the darker tones of Volume One. The little boy became much more mature in the new version, only being curious about the strange woman bearing a tattoo from an old story instead of scared.

I remember being very unhappy with page 12 back then, so I suppose I decided to go back and just redraw the page entirely in Photoshop, though I obviously never finished it.